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Though St. Peter’s Street continues on between the relatively new and mostly vacant office buildings into Freeschool Street itself, Studs thinks he’ll maybe go the long way round, down Narrow Toe Lane into the picked carcass of the former Green Street and work his way up from there. There might be clues: a footprint or perhaps a witness previously too intimidated to come forward, some surviving stonework in amongst the brick veneers that might turn stool pigeon given the right incentive. Hands in his high jacket pockets and the elbows sticking out like dodo wings he makes his way down the vestigial lane, mentally colouring his sketchy image of James Hervey as he goes.
As Studs imagines it, the probable scenario has seven-year-old Hervey walking in from Hardingstone to school each morning, more than likely unaccompanied and for at least half of the year making the journey in pitch blackness. He’d have started out from his home village, which two centuries thereafter would acquire further gothic credentials in the person of ‘Blazing Car’ murderer Alf Rouse. The little boy, perhaps with the same delicate look, the same primly pursed lips and a tendency to bad coughs even then, scraping along utterly lightless rural byways with nothing but sudden owls for company to the old London Road. There, every weekday of his early life, the hulking headless cross, one of the stone memorials raised by Edward the First at every spot where Queen Eleanor’s body touched the earth on its long transport back to Charing by the Thames, looming up still and black against a pre-dawn grey. With little Jimmy Hervey’s front door barely closed behind him, the religiously inclined and sickly infant would have been immersed immediately in the ancient town’s mythology, with the decapitated monument a gatepost at the mouth of its funereal romance.
Then a long downhill trudge towards the blacked-out urban mass below, as yet devoid of even gaslight, the frail schoolboy making e
ntry through the reeking shadows of St. James’s End where cursing traders pulled too soon from their warm beds load carts and barrows, calling to each other in an unfamiliar patois through the gloom. Squashed adult faces with strange blemishes, squinting, half turned towards him in the lurching candlelight and from a gated yard the steaming, shuddering snort of horses. His pink fingers numb with cold, who knows how many books beneath one weedy infant arm, the future fatalist would be obliged to mount the hump of West Bridge with the dark of the unbroken day ahead diluted almost imperceptibly at every grudging step, the timeless river heard rather than seen somewhere beneath him. At the crest, the midpoint of the span, the castle ruins would have made themselves apparent to the child in those antipodes of dusk before a risen sun could burn the fog away, a sprawling twilight acreage of tumbled stones with shrill and flittering specks about the lapsing walls, the stumps of amputated towers. Was Northampton’s crumbled fortress, currently its hooker-hub and railway station, once conceivably the larval form of every subsequent Otranto, every Gormenghast?
From there, with a determinist momentum hastening his pace the pious, ailing youngster would have trickled from the scoliotic bridge to its far bank, rolling into the Boroughs and the tangled yarn of streets, the madcap turrets wearing witch’s hats of pigeon-spattered slate. Then Marefair and St. Peter’s Church, the weathered buttresses embossed with gurning Saxon imps, Hieronymus Bosch extras yawning from some long-passed Judgement Day. A few steps further on, Hazelrigg House where Cromwell dreamed an ironclad English future on the eve of Naseby. A last right turn into Freeschool Street would bring the budding ghastly visionary to his place of education, just as a left turn is by now taking Studs into the same street’s other, lower end.
The district, which Studs still recalls from his insomniac night-jaunts of twenty years back, is unrecognisable, a loved one’s face on the first visit to Emergency after the accident. The broken spar of Green Street that has brought him from the foot of Narrow Toe Lane to his current junction has no buildings anymore, no southern coastal levees shielding the disintegrating land from the erosive tidal traffic swirl of Peter’s Way. As for the uphill climb of Freeschool Street before him now, it’s a transparent and insultingly inaccurate imposture, someone who looks nothing like your mum but turns up a week after the cremation claiming to be her. The steep lane’s western flank, once dominated by Jem Perrit’s woodyard, number fourteen, is now for the most part untenanted business premises all the way up to Marefair. As the hatchet-faced investigator haltingly ascends he tries to recreate Ben Perrit’s missing-and-feared-dead family home; superimpose the teetering two or three storey hillside edifice with its attendant stables, lofts, goats, dogs and chickens on the nearly vehicle-free forecourt of the memory-resistant modern structure that succeeds it, but to no avail. Some isolated features cling in his recall like tatters of a bygone show bill doggedly adhering to a corrugated fence – the three steps up to a black painted door, heirlooms and horse brasses displayed in the front parlour – but these fragments simply hang in empty recollected space without connective tissue, lobby cards and teasers for an unrecoverable silent classic.
Just across the way from the conspicuous absence of the Perrit home, on the untidy freehand margin that is Freeschool Street’s east side, Studs draws abreast of Gregory Street’s carious maw with the collapsing brickwork at one corner bounding an eruptive buddleia-jungle, once the backdoor entrance to St. Gregory’s Church and the free school which it incorporated when James Hervey was a pupil here. At some point after that a row of terrace houses occupied the previously sanctified ground, all odd numbers counting up from seven through to seventeen down at the Gregory Street corner if Studs’ memory serves him right, coincidentally the ages between which the young James Hervey would be visiting this humble gradient every morning. Studs thinks he remembers his client Alma Warren saying she’d had relatives who lived in one of the now derelict and roofless properties, an aunt or second cousin who’d gone mad and locked her parents out while she sat all night playing the piano. Something like that, anyway, one of the countless grubby dramas since supplanted by a butterfly bush smothering the untouched twenty-year-old rubble.
Studs is half across the spindly capillary, glancing reflexively uphill to see if anything is coming even though he doesn’t think cars are allowed down this way these days, when he notices a man and woman standing at the street’s top end apparently engrossed in conversation. Something about the flamboyant orange blur of waistcoat that the man is wearing strikes a chord and has Studs fumbling in an inside pocket for his spectacles. Reaching the street’s far side he saddles them on his ice-breaker beak and peers around the deconstructed corner house, pressed flat against its bowing wall in case one of the couple glances down the lane and spots him, the pretended habit of a lifetime.
It’s Ben Perrit.
It’s Ben Perrit, talking to a woman who’s not half his age, her hair in rows and a provocatively short red coat on that looks like it’s made from PVC. To all appearances she’s canvassing for coitus. While the beery bard has clearly raised his sights since the embrace with Alma Warren, Studs still can’t help feeling that Ben could have travelled further and done better for himself. The local poet’s prospects for romance, however, aren’t Studs’ most immediate concern right now. What’s Perrit doing here, especially in light of that apparently chance Abington Street sighting earlier? It has to be more than coincidence, or at least in Studs’ current mise en scène it does. He briefly contemplates the possibility that Perrit might be an improbably inexpert tail, perhaps employed by Warren to keep surreptitious tabs on her pet private eye, but hastily dismisses the idea. Ben Perrit, for as long as Studs has known him, has been in no state to follow his own literary calling, let alone pursue another person with perhaps less rubber in their legs.
He risks another peek around the dog-eared corner. Up at Freeschool Street’s top end the woman is now backing carefully away from Benedict, who giggles and gesticulates obscurely at her as she goes. No, definitely not a tail. Not in that vivid carpet-remnant waistcoat and not with that laugh that’s audible from all the way down here, the polar opposite of unobtrusive. All the same, they must add up to something, these suggestive near-encounters. Ducking back behind the listing wall he tries to put his finger on the feeling that he has, the sense he’s missing something here, some part of the big picture he’s not privy to. He understands that, in real life, to inadvertently bump into someone twice in the same day is nothing special, but he’s trying to keep in character. From Studs’ perspective, Perrit’s multiple appearances can only be some kind of narrative contrivance, an essential story mechanism or device which signals the impending resolution of the mystery, an unexpected drawing in of all its mucky threads: Ben Perrit and the girl in the red plastic mac, Doddridge and Lambeth and determinism. William Blake. James Hervey.
When he next peers up the lane both Perrit and his piece of skirt are gone. Studs puts his spectacles away and leans against the psoriatic bricks. What now? He’s reached the place that he’s been looking for, and short of a probably suicidal climb over the wall he’s propped against into the overgrown bee-cafeteria beyond, he can’t go any further. He can’t occupy the spaces that James Hervey’s body heat once passed through; doesn’t know what he’d hoped to accomplish with this pilgrimage through disappearance in the first place. Treading in a dead guy’s footprints like some toddler following his father through the snow, running on nothing but a blind faith in location as if walking the same streets as someone else forged any kind of a connection, how could he have been so stupid, such a schlemiel, possibly a patsy? Places don’t stay where you left them. You go back there, anywhere, and even if it looks exactly how it did before, it’s somewhere else.
He can remember Little John, during one of the relatively thoughtful and less raucous conversations that they’d had together. His folkloric friend had been in a more wistful, even plaintive humour than was usually the case, talking about a childhood that
he couldn’t properly recall, Arabian Nights he’d never really had.
“Y’know, I’d like to go back one day, Persia, the old country. See what it was like.”
No, John, mate. You can’t do that. Persia’s gone. ’79, they had a revolution after Jimmy Carter made the CIA stop paying off the ayatollahs so they’d leave your grandfather alone. They kicked him out and let the cancer finish him, and it’s a safe bet that the new regime aren’t big admirers of your family. It’s called Iran now. You’re not wanted there. You never were.”
Of course, you couldn’t say that. You could only mumble non-committally and wish him luck, ask him to bring you back a winged horse or a flying carpet, duty free, safe in the knowledge that by the next time John sobered up, the fond, nostalgic jaunt to Mordor would have been forgotten. It’s too bad that Studs ignored his own unspoken words of advice, hadn’t realised until right this moment that what’s true of Tehran is as true of Freeschool Street. This scruffy piece of ground has seen its revolutions, tyrannies replaced by other tyrannies, its character revised by different stripes of fundamentalism, socio-political or economic: King Charles, Cromwell, King Charles Junior, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair. Now that Studs thinks about it, the terrain beneath his feet even shares Little John’s status as deposed royalty: the rough trapeze of land bounded by Freeschool Street on one side and Narrow Toe Lane and Peter’s Gardens on the other would have been the grounds of Offa’s Saxon palace, with St. Peter’s and St. Gregory’s as the two churches flanking the construction to the west and east respectively. The yawning entrance to Jem Perrit’s buried wood-yard might have opened onto royal stables once, and if he’d only had the foresight to be born twelve hundred years odd earlier then Jem’s son Benedict could have been Offa’s jute-clad poet laureate, or possibly his fool. Poor Tom’s a-cold and a sheep’s bladder on a stick. Ben would have been a natural.
The breeze seems cooler on his stubble, and Studs briskly shakes his head to clear it of the memories, the reverie that gets all over you like gunshot residue. How long has he been standing here on Gregory Street’s corner, uselessly deliberating on dead dwarves and how it’s usually the turf that ends up as the loser in a turf war? He detects slight changes in the local ambience which indicate that he’s been holding up this listing wall for quite some time. The western sky is clearer with its light diluted and more palatable, understated tints of colour in its thinning wash as the blue fresco of the day reaches its edges. Distant cars and lorries would appear to have run out of things to say, their conversation flagging and become more intermittent, trailing off to grunts in the post rush-hour hush. Birds arcing down to guttering shrug off their troubles and assume the careless air of almost-home commuters. Friday, May the 26th, makes for the pink, embarrassed blush of its conclusion.
He decides to cast his poorly-placed Mr. Potato Head eye over Horseshoe Street, check out what’s left now of St. Gregory’s other end before he heads for home, calls it a day as if there’s something else that he could call it. In the absence of a bitter wind he turns his leather collar up so that he feels more isolated, and with a last glance at the ambiguous dealership which has supplanted Offa and Jem Perrit and all points between he rolls his shoulders in a hoodlum strut away down Gregory Street with the declining sun behind him. To his left the dereliction of the corner property continues pretty much unchecked while on his right there’s simply nothing there, an agoraphobic stretch of flayed land tumbling uninterrupted down to Peter’s Way and overprinted with a schist of levelled floor-plans like the quantum ripples still discernible on the event-horizon ‘skin’ of black holes, our only surviving record of the cosmic bodies already ingested.
At the street’s bend where it angles sharply to the south stands a three-floor Victorian factory, a great cube of smoked stone which would appear to have been transformed into a recording studio. A fashionably minimal house logo is affixed high on the soot-blasted façade in a naive attempt to impose an identity on the amnesiac edifice, just now pretending to be Phoenix Studios, a well-intentioned effort to evoke the flames of rebirth from the ashes of the neighbourhood, which clearly isn’t going to work. It wasn’t that kind of a fire. In what looks like a disused yard to one side of the building is a heaped moraine of tyres, deposited here long ago as though by a black rubber glacier in the long cold snap following the era of the dino-dozers and tyranno-JCBs, their jointed necks craning and swivelling to take a bite out of a displaced family’s front bedroom, grey wallpaper weeds trailing from yellow metal jaws, an undiscriminating swallowing. He turns right into Gregory Street’s continuation only to discover that there isn’t one. Beyond the studio there’s nothing separating this end of the road from the dual carriageway of Horseshoe Street which runs downhill in parallel, save for a couple of ridiculous low barriers that Little John could have stepped over without noticing. Studs feels a fleeting obligation to walk all the way down and around the edge of where the depots, builders’ yards and houses should have been, out of respect for the dead properties, but that strikes him as both insane and too much trouble so he cuts across the empty dirt instead.
The wide road is to all intents and purposes bereft of cars or people from its foot by the picked skeleton of the gas-holder up to its far summit at the top there, where it runs into the Mayorhold. In the tumbleweed hiatus between clocking off and tying a few on, the district’s voices, both contemporary and ancestral, switch off as abruptly as a background tape-loop. He can hear the empty moments settling like dust on the abandoned highway, muffling its ghosts, the silence bowling off downhill to quiet the supper tables of Far Cotton. Later, almost certainly, comes a cacophony of sirens, retching, intimacies bellowed into mobile phones and all the hairy other, but for now there’s this unscripted pause, the welcome presence of dead air.
He takes his time mounting the incline, feels professionally compelled to notice everything, to let no nuance slip the dragnet of his razor-honed atten-
tion. Here a paving slab cracked into fjords at one corner, there a rear view of the Marefair skyline with its hidden back-yard complications fondly cluttering the rooftop architecture, aerials and fungal growths of satellite dish sprouting from the chimney bricks or drainpipe heights. Across the way, above the low relief of a breeze-block crash-barrier running up the slope’s spine, the far side of Horseshoe Street is in a noticeably better state of upkeep than the tattered edge that Studs patrols, falling within the relatively well-maintained town centre rather than in the forsaken patchwork of the Boroughs. While the one-time motorcycle-
pirate haven of the Harbour Lights is presently enduring the indignity of a rebranding as the Jolly Wanchor or however one pronounces it, the building is at least still standing and may one day see again its leather-armoured clientele. A little further up, an iron-gated yard appended to the 1930s billiard hall looks incomplete without a stumbling and cheery bunch of post-war dads still in their demob suits and taking too long over farewells as they make unhurriedly towards the exit.
Just beyond the snooker parlour is the Gold Street corner where a century ago there stood Vint’s Palace of Varieties, a venue at which the young Charlie Chaplin played on various occasions. Studs is unsure if the great screen hobo’s skittering skid row routines would work as well against a backdrop of contemporary poverty; a different destitution. He thinks not, though that might be because he’s not imagining the Boroughs in decade-evading black and white, nor with its miseries conducted to a tinkling piano soundtrack. Background music changes everything. If they’d stuck some Rick Astley or perhaps the Steptoe theme behind his impaled-sister-raping scene in Besson’s Joan of Arc it would have been hilarious. Or “Nessun Dorma” over his Hamburglar appearances.
As he draws level with the snooker joint across the road he pulls his focus back to the distressed concrete hypotenuse he’s currently ascending, on the scummy side of the street with its disinterred carcass aesthetic and an angry pseudonym on every lamppost. Reckoning that this must roughly be the spot on which the east end of St. Gregory’s once stood he halts his climb to take stock of the victim district’s injuries, to gauge the full extent of what seem almost frenzied mutilations to its substance, even to its map. The surgical removal of the vital organs, could that be the killer’s signature? Some of the shallower cuts to the masonry look like defensive wounds in Studs’ professional opinion, and he’d put good money on discovering skin traces such as planning application notices beneath the chipped slates of the area’s fingernails. Struck by the unexpected poignancy of his hardboiled analogy he finds he’s starting to fill up. The neighbourhood, it’s … you know. Raped and with her face smashed in, but she put up a fight. Good girl. Brave girl. Sleep tight.
Finding a cafeteria serviette deep in one jacket pocket, Studs wipes quickly at his shiny sockets, blows his nose and pulls himself together before he resumes his survey. Nothing in the crazy-quilt of random surfaces and signs before him indicates even the homeopathic water-memory of a church. The past is cauterised. There’s even a dull red patch halfway up one mongrel wall which, without benefit of his corrective lenses, looks to him like a wax seal on the doomed territory’s document, a deal that was signed off some several generations back, all done and dusted. Nonetheless, this isn’t what James Hervey the short-trousered gothic schoolboy saw, scuffing his satchel on the rough sills of the eighteenth century. This isn’t what the unnamed pilgrim monk home from Jerusalem experienced a thousand years before, prompted by angels to the centre of his land and carrying a rugged cross to put there when he found it, hewn from heavy rock, a message from Golgotha like a petrified kiss on a postcard. And back then, there would have been no doubts about the provenance of the communication, not with Fed Ex seraphim arranging the delivery. Nobody would have wondered who the sender was, even with no return address. The angel couriers were rigorous scientific bona fides, their cruciform stone the equivalen
t of a Higgs boson particle arrived to validate the standard theocratic model. A big deal, in other words. An enchilada that was more than whole.
No wonder they made such a fuss about the artefact, set it into the Horseshoe Street face of St. Gregory’s where it remained a site of pilgrimage for centuries, all of those last-ditch fingertips tracing the worn-smooth axes to their intersection, all the lame and blistered feet which bore them here. The centre of the country, measured by God’s own theodolite. That surely must have carried some weight with King Alfred when he named Northampton foremost of the shires, effectively the capital in an alternate history where William never came. The great cake-scorcher was just rubberstamping policy laid down by the Almighty. More than merely royal pasturage this spot was holy ground, marked out by things with burning haloes at the say-so of an ultimate authority. That’s how they saw it, how it was: a violent and miraculous reality much like Studs’ own, perfumed by horseshit for the want of cordite. In a dark age the noir outlook would be a foregone conclusion.
And yet, even with the gulf of a millennium to separate the relic’s origins from Hervey’s schooldays, wouldn’t the conceptual charge and inspirational importance of the object remain undiminished in believing eyes, especially those of a seven-year-old boy whose father was a clergyman? For ten years, near enough a quarter of his prematurely interrupted life, the ailing child had laid his hands or eyes upon the primitive and earnest talisman, the chiselled X on an interior treasure-map, a seeding crystal of Jerusalem itself. The simple, fundamental shape would have been printed on his bedtime eyelids, colours back to front in the screensaver drift before sleep, a test pattern on the hypnagoggle-box. Enough to stamp that minimalist template onto Hervey’s coming life, Studs would have thought. A fragment carried here from the eternal holy city could provide the dynamo which drove the young ecclesiast in one side of John Wesley’s operation and then, acrimoniously, out the other. The Rood in the Wall they called it, manifesting Hervey’s granite-hard conviction, powering his writings, Theron and Aspasio or his sepulchral meditations, energies eventually earthed in William Blake who closes off the metaphysic circuit when he writes Jerusalem.
